As the Pinterest Engineering team found, converting animated GIFs to video can decrease load times and improve playback smoothness leading to a more pleasant user experience. This is the reason why GIF heavy websites like Giphy, Imgur and the likes do not use the actual GIF format, but rather convert it to HTML5 video and serve those to users instead. Unlike proper video formats, the GIF format does not take advantage of any of the new technology meaning that even a few seconds of content can lead to tremendously large file sizes since a lot of repetitive information is stored.Įven if you try to tweak the quality and length of a GIF with a tool like Gifsicle, it can be difficult to cut it down to a reasonable file size. Each frame in the animation is restricted to a palette of just 256 colors, and over the years, advances in compression technology has made leading to several improvements the way animations and video files are compressed and used. Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the first browser to added the ability for animated GIFs to loop, which lead to the rise of animated GIFs as we know them today.Īs an animation platform, the GIF format is incredibly limited. By default, the series of frames that constitute the animation was displayed only once, stopping after the last frame was shown. Later, basic animation capabilities were added which allowed the various images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays. The original design of the GIF format was to provide a way to compress multiple images inside a single file using a lossless compression algorithm (called LZW compression) which meant they could be downloaded in a reasonably short space of time, even on slow connections.
But the GIF format was not originally intended for animation. Rachel Andrew, on behalf of the Editorial TeamĪnimated GIFs have a lot going for them they’re easy to make and work well enough in literally all browsers. I’m sorry that we failed to do the right thing this time. Recognizing and crediting the work of people in our community is something I - and the whole team - care very much about. I’d like to personally apologize to Jeremy for not identifying this as a copy of his work. The original piece can be found here, and we would recommend it to you.
It has been brought to our attention that this piece is a reworded version of an article published on the Google Web Fundamentals site, written by our friend Jeremy Wagner. With HTML5 video, you can reduce the size of GIF content by up to 98% while still retaining the unique qualities of the GIF format in the browser. However GIFs are a terrible format for storing video and are often huge in size leading to slow page load times and high data usage. They provide more engagement than an ordinary image, while remaining more digestible compared to a typical video. Animated GIFs are popular on the web for good reason.
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